IBM Unica Interact Version 8.5.0 Publication Date: May 26, 2011 User's Guide
Copyright Copyright IBM 2011 IBM Corporation Reservoir Place North 170 Tracer Lane Waltham, MA 02451-1379 All software and related documentation is subject to restrictions on use and disclosure as set forth in the IBM International Program License Agreement, with restricted rights for U.S. government users and applicable export regulations. Companies, names, and data used in examples herein are fictitious unless otherwise noted. IBM, the IBM logo, Unica and the Unica logo, NetInsight, Affinium and MarketingCentral are trademarks or registered trademarks of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. Copyright IBM Corporation 2011. All rights reserved.
Table of Contents Preface Contacting IBM Unica technical support...9 1 Understanding IBM Unica Interact...11 Overview... 11 Understanding Interact... 12 Interact architecture... 12 Campaign key concepts... 15 About Campaign... 15 Audience levels... 16 Campaigns... 16 Cells... 16 Flowcharts... 17 Offers... 17 Sessions... 18 Interact key concepts... 18 Design environment... 18 Interactive channels... 18 Interactive flowcharts...19 Interaction points... 19 Events... 19 Profiles... 19 Runtime environment...20 Runtime sessions... 20 Smart segments... 20 Touchpoints... 21 Treatment rules... 21 Interact API... 21 Zones... 21 Working with Interact... 21 Interact users... 22 Version 8.5.0 3
Interact workflow... 22 Planning your Interact implementation...25 2 Configuring your interaction...26 Design environment... 26 About the Interact API...28 Task 1: Create an interactive channel...30 Working with interactive channels...30 The maximum number of times to show an offer...31 To create an interactive channel...31 About mapping tables... 32 To map the profile table for an interactive channel...32 To map dimension tables for an interactive channel...32 Map Profile Tables for Audience Level wizard...33 Interactive channel summary tab...35 Task 2: Create zones and interaction points...37 Working with zones... 38 To add a zone... 38 Working with interaction points...38 To add an interaction point... 39 Interaction point reference...39 Task 3: Create categories and events...40 Working with categories... 40 To add a category... 40 Working with events... 40 To add an event... 42 Event reference... 43 Task 4: Create offer constraints...43 Working with constraints...44 To add an offer constraint...44 To edit an offer constraint...45 To enable and disable an offer constraint...45 To delete an offer constraint...46 Task 5: Create custom learning models...46 Working with learning models...46 4 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
To add a learning model...46 To edit an learning model...47 To delete a learning model...47 To enable and disable an learning model...47 Task 6: Create smart segments...48 Working with smart segments...48 Create a session... 48 Define an interactive flowchart...49 Task 7: Define offers... 49 Define offers... 49 To create offer templates for Interact...50 Task 8: Create treatment rules...51 Working with treatment rules...51 Offer eligibility... 52 Marketing score... 52 Treatment rule advanced options...53 Working with the interaction strategy tab...53 To create an interaction strategy tab...54 To add a treatment rule...54 To add advanced options... 55 Treatment rule advanced option expressions...56 To enable and disable treatment rules...57 To delete treatment rules...58 About deploying interaction strategy tabs...58 To mark an interaction strategy tab for deployment...59 To cancel a deployment request...59 To mark an interaction strategy tab for undeployment...59 Interaction strategy reference...60 Task 9: Assign target and control cells...60 (Optional) Assign target and control cells...60 To override cell codes... 61 Task 10: Deploy the IBM Unica Interact configuration...61 Deploy the Interact configuration...62 3 Interactive flowcharts...63 Version 8.5.0 5
About interactive flowcharts...63 Building interactive flowcharts...64 To create interactive flowcharts...65 Interactive flowcharts and data sources...65 The test run profile table...66 Dimension tables... 67 Configuring interactive flowcharts...67 Queries and Interact... 67 About data types and stored objects...68 Derived fields, user variables, macros, and Interact...69 Using EXTERNALCALLOUT...70 About the Interaction process...70 About the Decision process... 71 To configure the Decision process...71 To configure Decision process branches...72 About the PopulateSeg process...72 To create smart segments...72 About the Sample process in interactive flowcharts...73 To configure the Sample process...74 About the Select process in interactive flowcharts...75 To configure the Select process...75 About the Snapshot process in interactive flowcharts...76 To configure the Snapshot process...77 Understanding interactive flowchart test runs...78 To configure the test run size...79 To perform a test run...80 About deploying interactive flowcharts...80 To deploy an interactive flowchart...81 To cancel a deployment request...81 To undeploy an interactive flowchart...81 4 IBM Unica Interact in batch flowcharts...83 About the Interact List process in batch flowcharts...83 Interact List process box... 83 To configure the Interact List process...84 6 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
5 Deploying to runtime servers...88 Understanding deployment...88 Understanding runtime servers...90 Deployment and delete... 91 To deploy to the production runtime server group...91 To deploy to a test server group...92 To undeploy... 93 6 IBM Unica Interact reporting...94 About Interact reporting...94 Interact reports data... 94 Interact 8.0.0 Reports and Reporting Schemas...95 Viewing Interact reports... 97 To view reports from the interactive channel Analysis tab...97 To view Interact reports from the Campaign Analysis tab...98 To view Interact reports from Analytics Home...98 About the Interaction Point Performance report portlet...99 Interact reports available from the interactive channel analysis tab...99 About the Channel Deployment History report (interactive channel)...99 About the Channel Event Activity Summary report...100 About the Channel Interaction Point Performance Summary report...100 About the Channel Treatment Rule Inventory report...100 About the Interactive Segment Lift Analysis report...101 Interact reports available from the campaign Analysis tab...101 About the Channel Deployment History report (campaign)...101 About the Interactive Offer Learning Details report...102 About the Interactive Cell Performance reports...102 About the Interactive Offer Performance reports...102 About the Interactive Cell Lift Analysis report...103 Filtering reports... 103 To filter by interaction point...103 To filter by event or category...103 To filter by offer... 103 To filter by target cell... 104 To filter by time... 104 Version 8.5.0 7
To filter the Channel Deployment History report...105 To filter the Channel Treatment Rule Inventory report...105 8 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
N10014 Preface N40001 Contacting IBM Unica technical support Contacting IBM Unica technical support If you encounter a problem that you cannot resolve by consulting the documentation, your company s designated support contact can log a call with IBM Unica technical support. Use the information in this section to ensure that your problem is resolved efficiently and successfully. If you are not a designated support contact at your company, contact your IBM Unica administrator for information. Information you should gather Before you contact IBM Unica technical support, you should gather the following information: A brief description of the nature of your issue. Detailed error messages you see when the issue occurs. Detailed steps to reproduce the issue. Related log files, session files, configuration files, and data files. Information about your product and system environment, which you can obtain as described in "System Information" below. System information When you call IBM Unica technical support, you might be asked to provide information about your environment. If your problem does not prevent you from logging in, much of this information is available on the About page, which provides information about your installed IBM Unica applications. You can access the About page by selecting Help > About. If the About page is not accessible, you can obtain the version number of any IBM Unica application by viewing the version.txt file located under each application s installation directory. Version 8.5.0 9
Preface Contact information for IBM Unica technical support For ways to contact IBM Unica technical support, see the IBM Unica Product Technical Support website: (http://www.unica.com/about/product-technical-support.htm). 10 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
N1001B 1 Understanding IBM UnicaInteract N50002 Overview Understanding Interact Interact architecture Campaign key concepts Interact key concepts Working with Interact Overview Interact is an interactive engine that targets personalized offers to visitors of inbound marketing channels. You can configure Interact to be behavioral, strictly event based, situational, strategic, and so on. Interact is a module within the IBM Unica suite of enterprise marketing management tools, and is integrated with IBM Unica Marketing. Interact exploits both online and offline data in-depth historical knowledge of customers as well as current customer activities to create real-time customer interactions that increase sales, build relationships, generate leads, increase conversion rates, optimize channel usage, and lower attrition. You can establish the business rules and sales or service strategies that drive real-time interactions, and modify them to reflect the continuous learning from your marketing efforts. Fully integrated with the IBM Unica suite, Interact gives your marketing organization the ability to coordinate real-time inbound customer treatment strategies with your traditional outbound campaigns. With Interact, you leverage the power of IBM Unica Marketing to enhance your real-time marketing efforts in several ways: Leverage your multi-channel operations Use information from all of your customer touchpoints web, call center, in-store, branch, and so on to develop a rich understanding of customers and prospects, create a consistent brand, and maximize customer communications. Create leading-edge website personalization Engage known and anonymous visitors, consider behavior, and personalize interactions with them by making cross-sell offers, selecting editorial content, offering appropriate service options, and coordinating banner messages. Optimize contact center interactions Version 8.5.0 11
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact N60002 Leverage the power of your contact center for increased revenue generation and customer retention. Provide smarter interactive voice response (IVR) navigation, onhold message selection, instant offers for retention and cross-selling, prioritization of offers, and website intervention (such as chat or VoIP). Interact lets you control and fine-tune the real-time, analytical content delivered to your touchpoint systems. Your strategies can include factors you consider important. These strategies can drive the response to specific customer actions, driving personalized content from an instant offer button on a website, to a cross-sell opportunity at a call center. Interact gives you control over critical online selling, marketing, and service strategies and the ability to respond quickly to opportunities or changes in your marketplace. Understanding Interact N70002 Interact integrates with your customer facing systems such as websites and call centers and allows you to retrieve optimal personalized offers and visitor profile information in real-time to enrich the interactive customer experience. For example, a customer logs into a book store website and peruses the site. Interact recalls the customer's prior purchasing habits (Japanese literature and books by a certain author). When the customer goes to a page you have integrated with Interact, Interact chooses what offers to present to the customer (a retelling of a famous Japanese story by the same author) based on the previous interactions. You configure Interact to integrate with your touchpoints using an application programming interface (API). Using this API, you configure Interact to gather a customer's information, add data to that information, and present offers based both on actions taken by the customer in the touchpoint and the customer's profile information. Interact is closely integrated with Campaign to define which offers are assigned to which customer. Because of this integration, you can use the same offers across all of your campaigns, along with all of Campaign's offer management tools. You can also integrate all the contact and response history across all of your campaigns and, for example, use email and direct mail contacts to influence offers presented to the user in real time. The following sections describe the different components of Interact and how they work together. Interact architecture Interact consists of at least two major components, the design environment and the runtime environment. You may have optional testing runtime environments as well. The following figure shows the high-level architecture overview. 12 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Interact architecture The design environment is where you perform the majority of your Interact configuration. The design environment is installed with Campaign and references the Campaign system tables and your customer databases. After you design and configure how you want Interact to handle customer interactions, you deploy that data to either a testing runtime environment for testing or a production runtime environment for real-time customer interaction. In production, the architecture may be more complicated. For example, a runtime environment may have several runtime servers connected to a load balancer to meet your performance requirements. The following figure shows the Interact environment in more detail. Version 8.5.0 13
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact In the design environment, you define what Interact does at certain points in your touchpoint by configuring interactive channels. You then divide your customers into segments by creating interactive flowcharts. Within interactive flowcharts, you can perform test runs to confirm that your customer data is segmented correctly. Next, you must define offers. You then assign the offers to segments within an interaction strategy. Once you have configured all of the Interact components, you are ready to deploy the configuration to a staging runtime environment. Interact deployments consist of the following: Interact configuration data including interactive channels and interaction strategies a subset of Campaign data including smart segments, offers, and interactive flowcharts While not part of your Interact deployment, your customer data may be required in the runtime environment. You must ensure this data is available to the runtime environment. 14 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Campaign key concepts In the staging runtime environment which is the same as a production runtime environment except that it is not customer-facing you can test the entirety of your Interact configuration, including the API integration with your touchpoint. During runtime, a customer or in the case of a staging server, someone testing the system takes actions in the touchpoint. These actions send events or requests for data to the runtime server by means of the Interact API. The runtime server then responds with results, such as presenting a set of offers (data) or re-segmenting a customer into a new segment (event). You can continue modifying your Interact configuration in Campaign and re-deploying it to the runtime environment until you are satisfied with the behavior. You can then deploy the configuration to the production runtime environment. The production runtime servers record statistical and historical data such as contact history and response history. If configured, a utility copies the contact history and response history data from staging tables in the production runtime server group to your Campaign contact and response history. This data is used in reports that you can use to determine the effectiveness of your Interact installation and revise your configurations as necessary. This data can also be used by Campaign and other IBM Unica products such as Optimize, integrating your real time campaigns with your traditional campaigns. For example, if a customer has accepted an offer on your website, you can use that data in Campaign to ensure either that the same offer is not sent by mail, or that you follow up the offer with a telephone call. The following sections describe important terms and concepts in both Campaign and Interact. N80001 Campaign key concepts NB0001 NC0001 Before you use Interact, there are several Campaign concepts you should be familiar with. These are brief descriptions of the concepts. For more information, see the Campaign User's Guide. About Campaign Campaign is a web-based Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) solution that enables users to design, execute, and analyze direct marketing campaigns. Campaign provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface that supports the direct marketing processes of selecting, suppressing, segmenting, and sampling lists of customer IDs. Once you have selected your targets, you can use Campaign to define and execute your marketing campaign by assigning offers, sending e-mails, and so on. You can also use Campaign to track the response to the campaign, creating output lists and logging contacts to contact history, and use that information in your next campaign. Version 8.5.0 15
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact ND0002 NE0001 Audience levels An audience level is a collection of identifiers that can be targeted by a campaign. For example, a set of campaigns could use the audience levels Household, Prospect, Customer, and Account. Each of these levels represents a certain view of the marketing data available for a campaign. Audience levels are typically organized hierarchically. Using the examples above: Household is at the top of the hierarchy, and each household can contain multiple customers as well as one or more prospects. Customer is next in the hierarchy, and each customer can have multiple accounts. Account is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Other, more complex examples of audience hierarchies exist in business-to-business environments, where audience levels may need to exist for businesses, companies, divisions, groups, individuals, accounts, and so on. These audience levels may have different relationships with each other, for example one-to-one, many-to-one, or many-to-many. By defining audience levels, you allow these concepts to be represented within Campaign so that users can manage the relationships among these different audiences for targeting purposes. For example, although there might be multiple prospects per household, you might want to limit mailings to one prospect per household. Campaigns In marketing, a campaign is a selection of related activities and processes that are performed to achieve a marketing communication or sales objective. Campaign also contains objects called campaigns which are representations of marketing campaigns that facilitate design, testing, automation, and analysis. Campaigns include one or more flowcharts that you design to perform a sequence of actions on your data for executing your campaigns. Cells A cell is simply a list of identifiers (such as customer or prospect IDs) from your database. In Campaign, you create cells by configuring and running data manipulation processes in flowcharts. These output cells can also be used as input for other processes in the same flowchart (downstream from the process which created them). There is no limit to the number of cells you can create. Cells to which you assign one or more offers in Campaign are called target cells. A target cell is a distinct group of homogeneous audience members. For example, cells can be created for high-value customers, customers who prefer to shop on the web, accounts with on-time payments, customers who have opted to receive email communications, or loyal repeat buyers. Each cell or segment you create can be treated differently, with different offers or contact channels, or tracked differently, for comparison in performance reporting. 16 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Campaign key concepts Cells containing IDs qualified to receive an offer but that are excluded from receiving the offer for analysis purposes, are called control cells. In Campaign, controls are always hold-out controls. The term cell is sometimes used interchangeably with segment. Strategic segments are cells that are created in a session rather than in a campaign flowchart. A strategic segment is no different from other cells (such as those created by a Segment process in a flowchart) except that it is available globally, for use in any campaign. A strategic segment is a static list of IDs until the flowchart that created it originally is re-run. NF0001 Flowcharts In Campaign, flowcharts represent a sequence of actions that you perform on your data, as defined by building blocks called processes. Flowcharts can be run manually, by a scheduler, or in response to some defined trigger. You use flowcharts to accomplish particular marketing goals, such as determining qualified recipients for a direct mail campaign, generating a mailing list for this group of recipients, and associating each recipient with one or more offers. You can also track and process respondents to your campaign, and to calculate your return on investment for the campaign. Within each of your campaigns, you design one or more flowcharts to implement the campaign, configuring the processes that make up the flowchart(s) to perform the required data manipulation or actions. Each flowchart has the following elements: name description one or more mapped tables from one or more data sources interconnected processes that implement the marketing logic N100001 Offers An offer represents a single marketing message, which can be delivered in a variety of ways. In Campaign, you create offers that can be used in one or more campaigns. Offers are re-usable: in different campaigns; at different points in time; for different groups of people (cells); as different versions by varying the offer s parameterized fields. Version 8.5.0 17
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact N110001 N90001 You assign offers to target cells in flowcharts using one of the contact processes, and track your campaign results by capturing data about customers who received the offer, and customers who responded. Sessions A session is a construct in Campaign where fundamental, persistent, global data constructs (such as strategic segments and cubes) are created by Campaign administrators and then made available to all campaigns. Like campaigns, sessions are also composed of individual flowcharts. Interact key concepts N120001 N130001 N140001 This section describes some of the key concepts you should understand before you work with Interact. Design environment The design environment is where you perform the majority of your Interact configuration. In the design environment, you define events, interaction points, smart segments, and treatment rules. After configuring these components, you deploy them to the runtime environment. The design environment is installed with the Campaign web application. Interactive channels An interactive channel is a representation in Campaign of a touchpoint where the method of the interface is an interactive dialog. This software representation is used to coordinate all of the objects, data, and server resources involved in interactive marketing. An interactive channel is a tool you use to define interaction points and events. You can also access reports for an interactive channel from the Analysis tab of that interactive channel. Interactive channels also contain production runtime and staging server assignments. You can create several interactive channels to organize your events and interaction points if you only have one set of production runtime and staging servers, or to divide your events and interaction points by customer facing system. 18 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Interactive flowcharts Interact key concepts An interactive flowchart is related to but slightly different from a Campaign batch flowchart. Interactive flowcharts perform the same major function as batch flowcharts dividing your customers in to groups known as segments. In the case of interactive flowcharts, however, the groups are smart segments. Interact uses these interactive flowcharts to assign a profile to a segment when a behavioral event or system event indicates that a visitor re-segmentation is needed. Interactive flowcharts contain a subset of the batch flowchart processes, as well as a few interactive flowchart specific processes. Interactive flowcharts can be created in a Campaign session only. N150001 Interaction points An interaction point is a place in your touchpoint where you want to present an offer. Interaction points contain default filler content in cases where the runtime environment does not have other eligible content to present. Interaction points can be organized into zones. N160001 Events An event is an action, taken by a visitor, which triggers an action in the runtime environment, such as placing a visitor into a segment, presenting an offer, or logging data. Events are first created in an interactive channel and then triggered by a call to the Interact API using the postevent method. An event can lead to one or more of the following actions defined in the Interact design environment: Trigger re-segmentation Log offer contact Log offer acceptance Log offer rejection You can also use events to trigger actions defined by the postevent method, including logging data to a table, including data to learning, or triggering individual flowcharts. Events can be organized into categories for your convenience in the design environment. Categories have no functional purpose in the runtime environment. N170001 Profiles A profile is the set of customer data used by the runtime environment. This data can be a subset of the customer data available in your customer database, data collected in real-time, or a combination of the two. This data is used for the following purposes: Version 8.5.0 19
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact N180001 N190001 N1A0001 N1B0001 To assign a customer to one or more smart segments in real-time interaction scenarios. You need a set of profile data for each audience level by which you want to segment. For example, if you are segmenting by location, you might include only the customer's zip code from all the address information you have. To personalize offers As attributes to track for learning For example, you can configure Interact to monitor the marital status of a visitor and how many visitors of each status accepts a specific offer. The runtime environment can then use that information to refine offer selection. This data is read-only for the runtime environment. Runtime environment The runtime environment connects to your touchpoint and performs interactions. The runtime environment can consist of one or many runtime servers connected to a touchpoint. The runtime environment uses the information deployed from the design environment in combination with the Interact API to present offers to your touchpoint. Runtime sessions A runtime session exists on the runtime server for each visitor to your touchpoint. This session holds all the data for the visitor that the runtime environment uses to assign visitors to segments and recommend offers. You create a runtime session when you use the startsession call. Smart segments A smart segment is similar to a strategic segment in that it is a group of customers with defined traits. Instead of a list of IDs, however, a smart segment is the definition of what IDs are allowed in the list. For example, a smart segment would be "All customers living in Colorado with an account balance greater than $10,000 who have applied for a car loan in the last 6 months." These definitions are represented by interactive flowcharts. Smart segments are only available in Interact. 20 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Working with Interact Touchpoints A touchpoint is an application or place where you can interact with a customer. A touchpoint can be a channel where the customer initiates the contact (an "inbound" interaction) or where you contact the customer (an "outbound" interaction). Common examples are web sites and call center applications. Using the Interact API, you can integrate Interact with your touchpoints to present offers to customers based on their action in the touchpoint. Touchpoints are also called client-facing systems (CFS). N1C0001 Treatment rules Treatment rules assign an offer to a smart segment. These assignments are further constrained by the custom-defined zone you associate with the offer in the treatment rule. For example, you may have one set of offers you assign a smart segment in the "login" zone, but a different set of offers for the same segment in the "after purchase" zone. Treatment rules are defined on an interaction strategy tab of a campaign. Each treatment rule also has a marketing score. If a customer is assigned to more than one segment, and therefore more than one offer is applicable, the marketing scores help define which offer Interact suggests. Which offers the runtime environment suggests can be influenced by a learning module, an offer suppression list, and global and individual offer assignments. N1D0001 Interact API The Interact application programming interface (API) can work as Java serialization over HTTP or as a SOAP implementation to integrate Interact with your touchpoints. N1E0001 Zones Interaction points are organized into zones. You can limit a treatment rule to apply to a certain zone only. If you create a zone that contains all of your "welcome" content, and another zone for "cross-sell" content, you can present a different set of offers to the same segment based on where the customer is in your touchpoint. NA0001 Working with Interact NA0008 Interact users Interact workflow Planning your Interact implementation Version 8.5.0 21
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact N1F0001 Interact users Interact is designed to be used by many people within your organization. Because Interact is a connection point between your touchpoints and your marketing campaigns, people involved with both parts of your organization will either be using or affected by Interact. The following list describes potential Interact user roles. These duties may be divided among several individuals in your organization, or a few people may perform multiple roles. A user who oversees all of the infrastructure that surrounds a touchpoint. While this user may not actively touch any configuration in the design environment, this person is in charge of making sure the touchpoint stays up and running, and writes the integration between the touchpoint and the runtime environment with the Interact API. This user approves deploying new configurations to production runtime servers. This user may also review statistics and reports from staging servers to analyze the effect of deploying new configurations to production runtime servers. A user who installs and configures Marketing Platform, Campaign, and Interact. This user also installs and configures the runtime server groups, and might also perform the steps to deploy new configurations. This user could be considered the Interact administrator. A user who designs real-time interactions. This user defines offers and which customers should receive them by working with interactive channels and campaigns. While this user may not perform the actual steps of configuration in the runtime environment, this user defines what the configurations are and spends a lot of time reviewing reports detailing performance and ROI. A user who designs segmentation logic for interactive channels by creating interactive flowcharts. A user who manages the data used by Interact. This person may not ever 'use' Interact, but is integral to your design team. This person must work with the user who designs the segmentation logic and the user managing the touchpoint to ensure that the correct data is where it needs to be, and is formatted and indexed properly to meet all performance requirements. Interact workflow Configuring Interact is a multi-step, multi-person, iterative process. The process from an idea to deployment can be broken into three major components: design, configuration, and testing. Design During the design phase you brainstorm about what kinds of interactive marketing strategies you would like to use. After you have an idea about what you want to have happen in your touchpoint, you need to determine how to implement that with Interact. This brainstorming is a cooperative effort between the person managing the touchpoint and the person designing the marketing plan. Using business goals and target metrics, they can create a list of interaction points and zones, and a rough list of segmentation and suppression strategies. These discussions should also include the data required to perform the segmentation. 22 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Working with Interact Configuration During the configuration phase the touchpoint administrator and a Interact user implement the design. The Interact user defines offer-to-segment assignments and configures the interactive channel within the design environment while the touchpoint administrator configures the touchpoint to work with the runtime server using the Interact API. Your data administrator needs to configure and create the data tables required for both testing and production. Testing As you finish configuring Interact in the design environment, you mark the various components for deployment to staging runtime environments. The Interact administrator deploys the configuration to the staging servers and the testing can begin. All members of the team involved with designing the Interact implementation review the results to confirm the configuration is performing as designed and the performance of the runtime environment is within tolerable limits for response time and throughput. Users may need to make some changes and more testing may need to be performed. Once everyone is pleased by the results, the manager can mark the configuration for deployment to production servers. At this time, the touchpoint manager may review all the results as well, to ensure that the configuration will have no adverse effects on the customer-facing system. Once the configuration has approval from all parties, it can be deployed to production runtime servers. The following diagram shows a sample design workflow. While this diagram shows a linear progression, in practice, many people can be working on different components at the same time. It is also an iterative process. For example, to configure the touchpoint to work with Interact using the Interact API, you must reference events created in the interactive channel. As the touchpoint administrator configures the touchpoint in the runtime environment, the administrator may realize that more events are needed. A Interact user then needs to create these events in the design environment. Version 8.5.0 23
1 - Understanding IBM Unica Interact The first task is to design the interaction. Next, create interaction points, zones, events, and categories in the interactive channel. The touchpoint administrator uses the names of the interaction points and events with the Interact API to configure the touchpoint. Continue to configure the interaction, creating interactive flowcharts in Campaign sessions and defining offers. After you have created all your zones, offers, and segments, you can create treatment rules on the Interaction Strategy tab of a campaign. This is where you assign offers to segments per zone. You may also take the time to assign target and control cells on the Target Cells tab. 24 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Working with Interact The interaction is now complete and can be deployed to a staging server for testing. N200001 Planning your Interact implementation Designing your Interact implementation requires the coordination of several components. The following example proposes one method of organizing the different questions you should answer to design a successful Interact implementation. These questions are for designing an interaction configuration. The first step of designing your implementation is asking, "How and where do I want to interact with my customers?" This question has an almost unlimited number of answers. Are you considering integrating with a website, an interactive voice response (IVR) system, or a point of sale (POS) system? Do you want to display banner ads based on site navigation, a list of further choices based on previous selections, or money saving coupons based on the current purchases? Most touchpoints have more than one location available for interaction, so you may need to ask this question several times. After you know what you want to do with Interact, you need to define what configuration components you need to create. You need to coordinate with the touchpoint administrator to define what interaction points and events must be created. You also need to consider what offers you present, how you segment your customers, and what sampling, integration, or tracking strategies you are using. The answers to these questions help define what information you will need to create in the profile database. At the same time, you should consider how you want to organize the interaction points into zones that are meant to serve a common purpose so you can fine tune your offer presentation. There are several optional features, including offer suppression, learning, individual offer assignments, and score override, which you may want to implement. Most of these features require specific database tables, and require little or no configuration in the design environment. For more information about these features, see the Interact Administrator's Guide. Since performance is an integral part of Interact, you must consider the data required to segment your customers. Since there is a performance impact each time data is retrieved from the database, you need to carefully design the information you provide for the runtime environments. For more information about designing and maintaining your customer data, see the Interact Administrator's Guide. Version 8.5.0 25
N100E3 2 Configuring your interaction N210001 Design environment About the Interact API Task 1: Create an interactive channel Task 2: Create zones and interaction points Task 3: Create categories and events Task 4: Create offer constraints Task 5: Create custom learning models Task 6: Create smart segments Task 7: Define offers Task 8: Create treatment rules Task 9: Assign target and control cells Task 10: Deploy the IBM Unica Interact configuration Design environment Designing your Interact configuration is a multi-step process involving many people in your organization. This section focuses on the various configuration steps required within the design environment. A large portion of the Interact configuration consists of setting up the integration with your touchpoint using the Interact API. For details regarding working with the Interact API, see the Interact Administrator's Guide 26 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Design environment The previous diagram is an extract from the full design workflow, showing only the configuration components which take place in the design environment. While this diagram shows a linear progression, in practice, many people can be working on different components at the same time. It is also an iterative process, for example, as you work with treatment rules, you may discover that you need to reorganize your interaction points and zones. Working with Interact configurations is also related to creating and working with traditional campaigns. A sample workflow could contain the following steps. 1. Create an interactive channel. 2. Create interaction points within the interactive channel. 3. Create events within the interactive channel. 4. Use interactive flowcharts to define smart segments. 5. Define offers. 6. Define treatment rules on the interaction strategy tab. 7. (Optional) Override target and control cells on the target cells tab. Version 8.5.0 27
2 - Configuring your interaction N220001 8. Deploy the interaction. After all of these tasks are completed, you have created all the components necessary for a Interact configuration in the design environment. You can mark these configurations Ready for deployment. Once the Interact administrator deploys the configurations to the runtime servers, and the touchpoint has been integrated with the Interact API, your Interact implementation is complete. About the Interact API Configuring Interact to work with your touchpoint consists of two main components: Configuring Interact in the design environment. Configuring your touchpoint to work with the runtime environment using the Interact API. While these two components of configuration take place in two different areas, they are related. The Interact API needs to reference several of the configuration elements within the design environment. You and the person working with the Interact API must work together to agree on naming conventions, element purpose, and so on. This is an iterative and collaborative process. As the person works with the Interact API and the touchpoint, you may need to create more events and interaction points. As you design the interaction in the design environment, you may have more requirements for the person working with the API. There are several elements of the Interact configuration referenced by the Interact API. However, only the following three elements are referred to by name: interactive channels interaction points events When working with the Interact API, you must reference these elements by name. These names must match, however they are case-insensitive. The names myinteract, myinteract, and myinteract all match. There are other elements of the Interact configuration you can use in the Interact API to enhance your interaction, including smart segments, campaign start and end dates, offers, and interactive flowcharts. During runtime, the Interact API does request information from interactive flowcharts and treatment rules, however the API calls for that information indirectly. For example, the API never calls an interactive flowchart. However, the API does call an event requesting a re-segmentation, which runs all of the interactive flowcharts associated with the interactive channel. Likewise, when the API requests offers with the getoffers method, that starts a sequence of events that includes referencing the treatment rules. The Interact API references the following elements of Campaign: audience ID 28 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
About the Interact API audience level custom offer attributes offer code offer description offer effective date offer expiration date offer name offer treatment code Since these elements are shared across the whole of the design environment, you must decide standards for these elements across your organization. Some of this information you must provide to properly call the Interact API such as audience ID and some you request with the API such as offer attributes. You can also reference the score for an offer with the Interact API. In general, this is the marketing score assigned on the interaction strategy tab. This score is relevant for Interact only, not your entire Campaign environment. You can modify or override the marketing score from the interaction strategy tab. For more information about the Interact API, see the Interact Administrator's Guide. Interact runtime The following section provides a brief overview of what happens on the runtime server during an interaction. When a runtime session starts, that is, when the visitor initiates a contact, the Interact API triggers a startsession. This call can include the following steps. 1. Create a new runtime session. A runtime session is an instance on the runtime server which contains all data associated with the visitor. This includes all known profile data and the results of any requests to the runtime, such as segment membership or a list of offers. 2. Load the visitor profile data into the runtime session. 3. Run all interactive flowcharts associated with the interactive channel and places the visitor into segments. As the visitor interacts with the touchpoint, the Interact API can perform several actions including triggering events, requesting profile information, and changing the audience level of the visitor. When the visitor reaches an interaction point in the touchpoint, the Interact API can request one or more offers or trigger an event. When the visitor leaves the touchpoint by logging out, hanging up, or timing out, the runtime server ends the runtime session. This is a basic overview. There are many optional features you can enable which allow you to influence offer recommendation, for example, the learning module. For more information about these optional features, see the Interact Administrator's Guide. N230002 Version 8.5.0 29
2 - Configuring your interaction Task 1: Create an interactive channel N230009 Working with interactive channels The maximum number of times to show an offer To create an interactive channel About mapping tables To map the profile table for an interactive channel To map dimension tables for an interactive channel Map Profile Tables for Audience Level wizard Interactive channel summary tab Working with interactive channels An interactive channel is a representation of a client-facing touchpoint that is used to coordinate all of the objects, data, and server resources involved in interactive marketing. In general, you should create one interactive channel for each touchpoint you are integrating with Interact. For example, if you have a website and a call center to integrate with Interact, create two interactive channels, one for each type of touchpoint. However, you may also want to create different interactive channels for the purpose of representing same-type touchpoints. For example, if you have different websites for your company's different brands, create an interactive channel for each brand, even if each site is hosted on the same server. Interactive channels are where you organize and configure several components of the interaction configuration, including interaction points, zones, events, and categories. The interactive channel is also where you map profile tables and deploy the interaction's processes and strategies to the runtime servers. You can find links to the other components of the interaction configuration (interactive flowcharts and treatment rules) on the interactive channel summary tab for your convenience. Interactive channels are one of the three elements of the Interact configuration in Campaign that interacts directly with the Interact API. You must use the exact name of the Interactive channel when using the startsession method in the API. This name is not case-sensitive. You can have as many interactive channels as required for your organization. Different campaigns can reference the same interactive channel for the interaction strategy tab. For example, if you have one campaign for new cell phones and another campaign for new calling plans, each campaign can have an interaction strategy tab for the website interactive channel. The same campaign can have several interactive strategy tabs, each referencing a different interactive channel. Therefore, the new cell phone campaign can have an interaction strategy tab for the website and an interaction strategy tab for the call center. N2D0001 30 IBM Unica Interact - User's Guide
Task 1: Create an interactive channel The maximum number of times to show an offer One of the settings for an interactive channel is the Maximum # of times to show any offer during a single visit. This setting defines how many times your touchpoint can display a single offer to a single visitor during a single runtime session. This number is tracked by the number of times the offer is logged as a contact, not by the number of times the runtime environment recommends an offer. If you never log offer contacts, the runtime environment assumes that the offer has not been presented, and therefore continues to recommend the offer, even if the maximum has been exceeded. The runtime environment also does not consider default strings as offers for the purpose of calculating the Maximum # of times to show any offer during a single visit. For example, all your interaction points have the same default string presenting the same default offer and something has happened on your network so that the touchpoint cannot reach the runtime server. Therefore, the touchpoint is displaying the default string from the interaction point. Although the touchpoint is presenting the same offer multiple times, it does not count for the Maximum # of times to show any offer during a single visit. N2E0001 To create an interactive channel 1. Select Campaign > Interactive Channels. The All interactive channels page appears. 2. Click the Add an Interactive Channel icon on the All interactive channels page. The Add/Edit Interactive Channel page appears. 3. Enter a Name and Description for the interactive channel. 4. Select the Security Policy for the interactive channel. 5. Select the server groups you want to associate with this interactive channel from the Runtime Server Groups list. You can select multiple server groups using Shift+Click or Ctrl+Click. 6. Select the production server from the Production Runtime Server Groups list. 7. Enter the Maximum # of times to show any offer during a single visit. 8. Click Save Changes. The interactive channel summary tab for the new interactive channel appears. To edit the interactive channel, click the Edit this page icon on the interactive channel summary tab. You cannot edit the security policy. Version 8.5.0 31